Bad Lieutenant (1992)

I'm a big fan of the films of Abel Ferrara but I don't like this one. Does whether I like it or not have any baring on whether I think it good or not? Probably shouldn't but its kind of inevitable. Big problem here is the quartet of main themes, Catholic Church, gambling, drug taking and baseball. Not keen on the inclusion of any of them, let alone all four. In different circumstances inclusion of matters relating to the church wouldn't be so bad but here it really is central and we get heartfelt endorsements as well as criticism. I feel that seeing young children in a line being told that a wafer is the body of Christ is severe abuse. And if this didn't get m angry there is the whole New York cop corruption business. Was it really ever this bad in the state? Maybe but it is pretty hard to believe. Anyway the writer/director seems to take pleasure in this, how he got Keitel to perform in this the way he does, I've no idea, but the glee with which we are dragged through the gutter is disturbing in itself. Made for next to nothing, the film is remarkably well made but I for one could do without it, thanks.

One thing I will say about "Bad Lieutenant" is that it was cool to see the movie's events play out during the Mets/Dodgers playoff series. Between that and the bets being placed on the games, it's not everyday you see baseball so woven into the fabric of a non-sports movie. It's nice.Along with that, I'll definitely say that Harvey Keitel's performance is unequivocally the reason to see this movie. He's unhinged, way off-course, on the raggedy edge. And the movie's title is an understatement. He's straight-up vile, a vigilante cop that dabbles in your seedier vices, pilfers money from robbery scenes and extorts underage girls to get off. He's something else. And my burning question the entire time was "Why?". Why is he so bad? Too many years on the street, too many divorces? But we're not given that information. He's just bad . . . because.But his misdeeds are so outlandish that the lurid and shocking reputation this movie has attained just gives way to over-the-top. By the time he's weeping at the feet of Jesus, it's absurd. I don't think laughs are what Abel Ferrara was going for with that scene. I know this movie's about redemption (in the Catholic sense), but there's nothing to feel for this guy. He's cardboard.5/10

What struck me even more than specific moments of the movie is the fact that Bad Lieutenant has been co-written by a woman, Zoë Tamerlis Lund. If you've read anything about her you'd understand how her own life story bleeds through the script. At a certain point you might even admire the passion with which she systematically worked on her own self destruction with, to vaguely quote her husband, heroin being her drug of choice.One summer in the mid-ninety-nineties i happened to be in a country where motion picture rating system had yet to be introduced. The weather prompted whole families to flock at an open-air cinema in search or refreshment and entertainment in the evening. It turned out that Bad Lieutenant has been one of the films featured. It would be interesting to know how all those people liked the movie and how it influenced the development of the youngest viewers.The reason to pull this story out is that, apart from artistic merit and portraying the dark side of life, it is questionable how rake and debauchery influence the viewers. Does it lead to some kind of catharsis or to repeating what we've seen on screen?Either way, Bad Lieutenant is a powerful movie, though not in a positive way. Harvey Keitel's performance is pivotal and you'd probably appreciate it even more if you've seen Werner Herzog's take at the same topic with Nicolas Cage.

"We gotta eat away at ourselves till there's nothing else" declares the Lieutenant's emaciated junkie-in-arms. He goes nameless, just the Lieutenant. When the case of a raped nun comes up, he takes special glee driving home to co-workers how the corporate church is just another racket, just another user, all with a compelling gleam in his eye. He makes a good show of his faithlessness but can't really escape something so ingrained. The agonizing tug-of-war that results from these two polarities makes up the brunt of the movie: the more the case of the raped sister haunts him, the more the Lieutenant dives to new depths. Unable to make a break with the Christian vampire cult, marked for life with their brand, he transforms the symbolic cannibalism of the Host body into a literal consumption of his own, spiraling in a kamikaze cycle of addiction. His quest for self immolation is obsessive, demanding nothing less than total devotion to appetite. He doesn't seem to dig any of it either, barely able to keep from exploding into incoherent rage most of the time. Self indulgence has never seemed so joyless.Again & again our noses get rubbed in how far this guy's fallen: snorting coke off his kid's pictures, verbally raping two teens, booze hookers bets- it's all completely absurd, just outrageous; you feel embarrassed for the actors. The flat documentary style allows Ferrera to explore depths of self-destruction in a way not many mainstream films could; the sleaze quotient is in service to something else. It goes so far over-the-top that you're not sure where the damned line is anymore, whether you should be laughing or cringing: that's when everything becomes really real. Ferrara's knocked us off our feet and we don't know where the hell this is going. When he isn't bartering away his last shreds of dignity, the Lieutenant glides through his world like a specter, hulking in some shadowy backstreet or stairwell, passed out on the couch while his family step over his drunken body. Hungry ghosts are people not fully alive, they're phantoms tormented and driven by impossible-to-satisfy cravings, seeking to plug the emptiness inside. It's like a lot of homeless people you spy on the curbside, not fully there, faded into the scenery. The living dead.The city this guy haunts is suffocating, inescapable; the noise, overcrowding and casual depravity make it modern day Gomorrah, perfect backdrop for the hell bound. Labyrinths of twisting alleys, decaying slums, disembodied radio voices- all crammed together tighter than expired sardines in a can. The place is like a powder keg, you can feel the burning fuse (the only time you get noticed in these parts is by having your brains splattered over the dashboard). The first world seems third, a cosmopolitan abyss that's barely keeping the barbarians at the gate. It mirrors the inner state of the lieutenant, one more cockroach scuttling in the dirt.He has a vision of Jesus Christ. JC appears bloodied and bruised, looking at him from between church pews, His silence driving our tormented soul hysterical. Teeth gnashing seems an appropriate description, a modern recreation from scripture: 'Oh father, why hast thou forsaken me!?' That this kind of thing exists simultaneously between some of the trashiest scenes you'll ever witness is key, of course. The sacred and the profane exist side by side and like, cancel each other out into this weird, feverish lucidity. Doesn't it make perfect sense? A technicolor MGM bible romp seems about as inauthentic to the spirit of the Word as you can get if we're talking 'spiritual' sinema, here. Without the dirt the lotus don't grow.A consummate termite artist, Ferrera smuggles in real stuff beneath his b-movie shells. Even something as vulgar and test-run as Driller Killer had heavier topics on its mind than just hocking gory goods, ditto Ms.45. Bad Lieutenant carries on the tradition: It's a warts and all portrait that drives home the meaning of 'Catholic guilt' like nothing else you'll see. That and Harvey Keitel's complete nakedness (ha ha) might leave unfamiliar viewers feeling guilty themselves. All of it will elicit strained giggles from those unaccustomed to such directness, such cultivated vulnerability and if we didn't live in bizzaro-land Keitel would've been the one picking up the golden statuette in 92 instead of hoo-ha Pacino. That any movie addressing religious identity and the G-word so openly got made in a proudly godless system seems pretty cool.